Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell Page A

matter with Dario, since I did not completely trust my own temper yet. What emerged from between the lines of Mimmo’s report was the probability that Dario had directed the shoot in name only. The cameraman had run loose and ignored the sound man, who had thus been forced to run miles of tape in order to be sure of covering every shot. After that, I suppose, the sound man would have gone into hiding, lest anyone should call upon him to straighten it all out. All of the quarter-inch tape had been transferred to sixteen-millimeter mag. I inherited the little chore of reducing it by a factor of ten before anything which could properly be called editing could begin. I estimated that it would take about two weeks, provided I could teach Mimmoto do some of it for me, to sync everything up. Well, it was their money.
    Another strong probability was that Kevin had somehow messed in the nest again, letting a shoot as sloppy as this one go down. The price he’d put on my job didn’t seem so outlandish anymore. “The rough cut’s a little rough.” No kidding.
    I bugged out of the QED studio for the remainder of the weekend and turned myself into a tourist. I went to the Colosseum and the Pantheon. I wandered through any number of splendid churches. I took the shortest, most manageable tour of the Vatican collection. And once I was saturated, drenched, with culture and art, I simply walked. I would cross one of the bridges from Trastevere, follow the curve of the river for a gentle shady mile, then double back and find my way home through the twisted streets on the western side. It was a tolerable exercise in geography and map reading and it killed time and tired me out enough to sleep.
    I worked over my phrase book some, until I was speaking fairly effective pidgin again. Good enough so I could shop for food to cook in my borrowed or stolen Trasteverepad. And it was a pleasure to cook with fresh pasta, top-grade olive oil, the odd pear-shaped local tomatoes, the variety of available cheeses. A few meals I ate out, favoring the Trastevere restaurants, which were cheaper and less touristy, and finally settling on my own corner trattoria as the regular stop.
    I let my weekend stretch until Thursday, the day Mimmo thought the work print would probably come in, and I kept clear of QED for the whole time. If I went there with nothing to work on I was afraid I might get irritated again at something or other. So I stayed away. I was exercising and eating well and I was on a fairly strict ice tea diet, except for that windfall bottle of vodka. I rationed that out to myself in small measures, since I’d decided not to get another one. Under the circumstances of my solitude and idleness I didn’t want to risk a binge. If my throat itched for an extra drink I’d read a little Kierkegaard.
    The vodka ran out on Tuesday and by Wednesday I was beginning to look for loopholes in my austerity program. In the early evening I went to the trattoria for an early supper and mainly to get out of the house, and there I remembered about grappa. There’s no language difficulty about ordering grappa. You just say “grappa” and the man brings you some, in this case a sizable portion for the equivalent of about thirty U.S. cents. It’s not vodka, and it’s surely not bourbon, but it’s easy to get and not at all bad.
    And it was the grappa, the seeds-and-stems burning taste of it, that made me think of the Trevi Fountain, which I’d somehow missed out of my tourist stops. So I left it at the one glass and walked there. It was a long walk and I made it a brisk one and by the time I got there the drink had almost completely worn off.
    The sun was going down and it was almost completely gone from the closed piazza which frames the fountain. A single shaft of fading sunlight fell on one of the horses that plunge out of the portico over the falling water. A busload of German tourists stood gabbling around the fountain and I waited until they organized